Books on Statesmen

Evan Thomas chooses distinguished books on statesmen

1. Present at the Creation. Dean Acheson. Norton, 1969. [327.73 A (International Relations) and  973.918 A (North American history)]

Most people, when they are in the midst of history being made, are too caught up in the moment to see its larger meaning. Not the great American statesman Dean Acheson: His aptly named autobiography captures the precise date, on Feb. 27, 1947, when the duties of Pax Britannica passed to Pax Americana. Britain on that day told the U.S. that the British were no longer able to help protect Turkey and Greece from Soviet expansion; America was on its own. "We drank a martini or two to the confusion of our enemies," recorded Acheson, who would go on to become secretary of state (1949-53). Written with grandeur, verve and a certain puckish delight, "Present at the Creation" is the frankest and most gripping work by a statesman since Ulysses S. Grant's 1885 autobiography.

Grant's work is magnificent.

2. Passionate Sage . Joseph Ellis. Norton, 1993.      973.4409 E

Over the past decade or so, the best-seller lists have included some big and wonderfully readable biographies of the Founders, but the best portrait of a Revolutionary-era statesman is this slim, dense and relatively little known volume about John Adams. Written by Joseph Ellis before his own blockbuster biographies of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, "Passionate Sage" is structured thematically. It demands a reader's close attention, but the reward is great. Ellis shows that Adams was able to use his shrewd understanding of human vanity, especially his own, to shape a government system of checks and balances. Ellis has fun with the irrepressible Adams, who like his old friend and rival Jefferson was obsessed with his place in history. "I thought my Books, as well as myself, were forgotten," Adams joked to Jefferson in 1813. "But behold! I am to become a great Man in my expiring moments."

3. Master of the Senate.  Robert A. Caro. Knopf, 2002.   B Johnson C

The United States Senate is, generally speaking, a boring place. On most days the chamber is empty, or a single senator drones on as others wander in and out. Yet Robert Caro—researching "Master of the Senate," the third volume in his magisterial series "The Years of Lyndon Johnson"—sat day after day high in the public galleries, conjuring the drama of an earlier time when giants, or one particular giant, strode the Senate floor. Caro's LBJ cajoles, whines, blusters, deceives, intimidates—and gets the Senate, still dominated in the 1950s by Southern Democrats, to pass the first-ever civil-rights bill. Johnson is crude, to put it mildly—Caro describes him on a "monument of a toilet," browbeating secretaries, assistants and other lawmakers. But if only we had someone like LBJ in Congress today.

4. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Edmund Morris. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979.  B Roosevelt M

Edmund Morris virtually inhabits his subject in "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" (the first book in a three-volume series that will conclude later this year). His feel for Roosevelt—a bragging, bullying, bellowing, yet somehow tender and always steadfast young man—is so tactile that it verges on the sensuous. "He was dubbed 'The Chief of the Dudes,' and satirized as a tight-trousered snob given to sucking the knob of his ivory cane," Morris writes. This volume, about the pre-presidential Roosevelt, is more engaging than the one that followed. Presidential biographies are almost inherently heavy going because presidents must always be doing too many things at once. But Morris, like TR, is never dull.

5. The Proud Tower. Barbara Tuchman. Macmillan, 1962.    901.941 T (also 909.82, and 940.28, and 940.311)

The turn of the 20th century was a great age of statesmen, or so it seemed. Dressed handsomely in frock coats, cutaways and top hats, they gravely, pompously, naïvely held international conferences that vowed to put an end to war, forever. Reading Barbara Tuchman's collection of elegant, elegiac essays about this period, you can almost hear the ice cracking beneath their feet. (The title comes from an Edgar Allan Poe poem, "While from a proud tower in the town / Death looks gigantically down.") One portrait is particularly captivating: the tragedy of Thomas Brackett Reed, the House speaker who tried to stop America from lunging into the race for empire in the last years of the 19th century. Reed was brilliant and indomitable, but he was unable to stand in the way of the lust for conquest and dominion that seized America and much of the civilized world on the eve of World War I.

—Mr. Thomas is the author of  The war lovers : Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the rush to empire, 1898. 973.891 T


Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W8